Mother's Love, Delivered Without Hug

By KAREN CROUSE

Published: September 9, 2007

His mother pulled up to the curb and stopped the car, but 10-year-old Darrelle Revis would not get out. He gazed out the window at all the freakishly tall players who were streaming into the gym and started to cry.

Diana Gilbert tried nudging Darrelle, her firstborn, out the car door for the first day of a basketball camp in Memphis. ''I don't want to,'' he told her. ''Those kids are bigger than me.''

Gilbert's first instinct was to hug him, but because she knew how he felt, she did not. Steeling her voice to give it a razor-sharp edge, Gilbert said recently, she delivered the speech that she wished she had heard at the same age, the one that would almost certainly have set her life on a smoother course.

She recalled telling him: ''It doesn't matter how big you are, what size you are, where you come from. You can accomplish things in life. You can overcome things. You go to that camp, and you show what you've got because I know you can play.''

Darrelle dried his eyes. With an assist from Gilbert, he was on his way.

''I had fun and won a trophy and made the all-star game,'' he said this week.

Revis, now a 22-year-old rookie cornerback for the Jets, is expected to start in Sunday's season opener against New England at Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J. Patriots quarterback Tom Brady will surely try to torment Revis, who was a high school sophomore when Brady won the first of his two Super Bowl Most Valuable Player awards.

Patriots receiver Randy Moss will probably also try to pick on Revis, who was in the seventh grade when Moss was the N.F.L. offensive rookie of the year for 1998.

Revis, who is 5 feet 11 inches and 204 pounds, says he is not afraid of the challenge the Patriots' passing offense presents. When the competition is tough, he thinks back to that day in Memphis.

''That speech was very motivational,'' he said. ''It was just a hump she helped me get over, being nervous about going up against bigger guys and older guys.''

Gilbert, 40, can be as blunt as a butter knife, but her homespun wisdom comes wrapped in honeyed laughter. She is the kind of person to whom people confide their personal stories five minutes after meeting her.

Her story is cautionary. Gilbert could outrun boys, and a teacher in fifth grade suggested that she run track. But Gilbert did not believe in her gifts, and nobody in her family encouraged her to unwrap them.

Her younger brother Sean became a first-round draft pick of the Los Angeles Rams and a defensive lineman for 11 N.F.L. seasons. In a telephone interview, he acknowledged that Diana, the oldest of five, was the best athlete.

''She was fast,'' Sean Gilbert said. ''Really fast. You could see the potential there. I raced her when I was a teenager, and she beat me.''

But in Aliquippa, Pa., where the Gilberts and Revis spent most of their lives, the emphasis was on football. The boys like Gilbert, Mike Ditka, Tony Dorsett and Ty Law, who were able to use it as a springboard, received all the attention.

''Where we grew up, the focus is on the males who make it out,'' Sean Gilbert said. ''You don't focus on the females who even get to college and go on to do successful things.''

As a high school junior, Diana Gilbert started dating Darryl Revis, a fullback. He was her first love. That year, she went out for the track team and became infatuated with running. Racing at distances from 100 to 400 meters, she quickly earned the nickname Gold Shoes.

Pounding her feet on the track was fun and cathartic, providing a release for all the pent-up anger she had once unleashed by pounding her fists in schoolyard fights.

Around that time, she told her mother the root of her rage: Gilbert said she had been sexually molested by relatives from age 6 to 15.

Although her track coach offered to help her pursue an athletic scholarship to the University of Texas, Gilbert refused the baton.

''I didn't think college was for me,'' she said. ''I was Darryl Revis's girlfriend, and that meant everything to me.

''I was in love with him, and I wasn't looking at the things I could do. My goal was to have Darrelle. I thought that was my purpose.''

Thirteen months after she finished high school, Gilbert gave birth. The labor was long, and complications arose.

''Darrelle was a blessing,'' she said. ''I almost died having him.''

Gilbert never married Darryl Revis, who attended college in Indiana on a football scholarship. Revis grew up spending some summers with his father, who told stories of Gilbert's athletic prowess.

''He said they raced a couple of times and she was faster,'' Darrelle Revis said. ''I definitely get my speed from her.''

In 2004, Gilbert watched on television as Lauryn Williams, who grew up in the neighboring town of Rochester, raced to an Olympic silver medal in the 100 meters.

''When I saw her run,'' Gilbert said, ''I thought, That maybe could have been me, you know?''

Most of what Revis knows about his mother's running career, he learned from his father, uncles and aunts. Gilbert never talked about it, but it informed her every move in rearing Revis and his siblings: D?dra, 19, and Terry, 16.

''She's been through so many things in her life that I wouldn't have been able to imagine,'' said Revis, who played three seasons at Pittsburgh.

He added, ''Just to see my mom overcome stuff like that and still raise three children and be loving and just make sure we're on the right path, I know I can overcome anything as well on the football field and off.''

PHOTOS: Diana Gilbert told her son Darrelle Revis to overcome his fear and play with bigger boys. (PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN DUNN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES; The Jets traded up in the draft in April to be able to pick Revis. He is set to start at cornerback today against the Patriots. (PHOTOGRAPH BY STEPHEN CHERNIN/ASSOCIATED PRESS)